Work Text:
The path was so overgrown, Akari could hardly find her way. That, in itself, told her something.
No wagon tracks. The Ginkgo Guild had not been here for years, either. Now that she thought about it, it had been a long time since she'd seen them at all. She felt guilty for not noticing, but there had been so much she hadn't noticed, and she could hardly blame herself. She'd had other priorities over the past ten, fifteen, twenty-or-so years.
Soon it would be the turn of the century, though Akari supposed that depended on the calendar. Days and weeks and years were just human ways of keeping track of time in a mutually agreeable way, after all. None of it meant very much to someone who had travelled through time itself. But everyone was talking about it, and all this talk of the future had turned Akari's attention towards the past. All the things she had forgotten, without even realising. All the things she'd wanted to forget, but could not. And the things she'd remembered, but had had so little time for lately.
Akari was going to visit someone who was no longer there. That was a heavy thing to do, and having to drag her feet through thick, clinging grass made it feel even heavier. She only recognised the route from the way the hills rose up at either side, guiding her but also hemming her in, making her feel trapped. She felt as though they were looking down on her, judging her for leaving it so long.
"Empty places don't need visitors," she muttered.
Yes, she might have made some vague promises about looking after the place. But people said all kinds of things in grief, or near-grief, didn't they? Cogita wouldn't have held her to it. Cogita wouldn't have held her to anything, after both of their duties had been fulfilled. Especially not with Akari having children to take care of.
They'd made such a contrast: Akari creating life, while Cogita slowly slipped towards its end. Released from her burden, she was finally, gradually, released from the immortality that had been her curse. Even if it was an end that she'd eagerly awaited for centuries, even if she celebrated every moment of her decline and stayed gracious through it all....even so, endings were always so...
Akari's vision blurred. It was too early to be crying, and she needed to see where she was going. So, she quickly wiped away her tears, and tried to think about how glad she was that Cogita had lived long enough to meet all of the children, no matter how briefly.
Soon, the comforting and familiar sound of the stream provided some gentle, additional guidance. Akari wondered how a stream could sound so particular, since it definitely didn't sound like the rivers in town, nor any out in the wilds. No, it had its own song, which didn't seem to have changed over the years. It brought on more tears, which she brushed away again.
The bridge had collapsed. It was a sad sight, but hardly surprising, since it had only been a few flimsy planks of wood. Beyond it, the once-neat garden where Cogita had kept a tidy vegetable patch was now buried under wildflowers and weeds.
Akari took a short run and jumped over the narrow stream. It might have looked playful, to anyone watching, but her tears were flowing faster than she could keep up with them now, faster than the stream. She wrapped her sleeve ends over her hands and sobbed into them as she picked her way up the plant-strewn path.
The house was still here, though its frame was rotting in places. That, plus years of unchecked snowfall, had caused the roof to sag inwards. Akari stood at the door. The glass panels had always been impossible to see through, due to their texture, but now they seemed totally opaque. Akari thought it might just be dust, but when she raised her hand to the door, she changed her mind and backed away.
She couldn't help but see the clouded glass as a message. A polite rejection. The house wanted to be left alone, just as its former resident had cherished her solitude. Even as Cogita's friend, Akari had never walked through that door without being invited, and she didn't want to change that.
Instead, Akari walked to the side of the garden where they would often sit and share a pot of tea. To her surprise, Cogita's table and chairs were still right there, though they were rusted, and the tile mosaic on top of the table was missing several pieces.
Akari picked up one of the chairs, wincing at how heavy it was. She was planning to carry it round to the back of the house. Somewhere back there was Cogita's final resting place, and Akari had intended to go and sit with her. But she found it so overgrown that she couldn't even see the simple headstone. And the chair was so heavy.
She knew that she was getting weak, even though she didn't feel that old. Certainly, she was too slow and achy to be running around Hisui as she used to do. Maybe all her past antics had taken a toll on her body. Or maybe it was the trauma. She was sure she'd heard something about that, though she guessed it must have been something from the future. People in Hisui weren't very familiar with the concept of 'trauma' at all, let alone its effects on the body and mind. She could never find any writings about it here.
"I'm sorry..."
Akari returned to the table and put the chair back where it belonged. By now, she was crying so much that she wondered if she should just give up, and start her long journey back to the village. She had never been away from the children for this long, and though they were hardly even children anymore, her unease was not helping her tears. She felt so terribly alone.
Cogita had mentioned being a mother once, though it had been a very, very long time ago. Long ago, and covered with a veil of tragedy, since Cogita's burden of temporary immortality had meant that she'd outlived and forgotten her own children, and pretty much everyone else. Akari wondered if she would have been a sympathetic ear right now. Sometimes she had been, but sometimes not. No point in covering up her flaws; Cogita would not have wanted that.
Akari sat down at the table, taking deep breaths, trying to calm herself. Other than the stream, the breeze, and distant sounds of Starly, the place was too quiet. Akari was surprised at how much it bothered her, since Cogita had been a fan of sitting in silence. Akari had tried to learn how to be comfortable with it, but she'd never quite managed it. And she wasn't going to manage it now.
"Sam is training to be a miner," she said. The vibration of her throat, talking to nobody but the air, felt unnatural. Her voice sounded rough with sorrow. But she kept trying, even forcing herself to laugh a little. "I told him it was dangerous, but he still wanted to do it. Wonder where he gets that from."
Akari remembered that, when he'd told her, she'd asked what mine he was talking about. For some reason, she'd imagined the ancient quarry in the mountains, and her stomach had twisted at the idea of her son being up there, in that place that still held so much pain and fear for her. But his answer was, somehow, even worse.
'Oreburrow. In the Fieldlands.'
There were things that Akari had never told her children. Not even when they had unknowingly, innocently dangled reminders in front of her. Don't go out of town at night or the bad man will get you. What bad man? The bad man from the ruins. He has a big scary ghost with him and he attacks children.
Akari had felt her knees buckle. She'd almost passed out, realising with a mixture of dread and disbelief that her story had become a folk tale that children were throwing around like a Pokeshi doll. Her own children.
'They're mining at Oreburrow Tunnel?' she'd asked, trying not to sound frantic. 'Since when?'
'For years. They've got a whole camp there. It's nearly a village. How did you not know that? Everyone knows that.'
Teenage sass, in an era when teenagers didn't even officially exist as a concept. Akari had brushed it off, because she was too busy thinking about what it meant, and trying not to show her terror. She'd never let her children see that part of her.
After what had happened on Mount Coronet, she'd had an unspoken agreement with Volo, that she would turn a blind eye to his camping in Oreburrow Tunnel. He'd wanted to stay there because it was an optimal place for someone to survive; being an outlaw gave him few choices. If she left him alone, he would leave her - and the village - alone. They would never have to see each other again. And they never did. Even though Akari had continued doing survey work for a few more years, she'd never laid eyes on Volo again.
She hadn't owed him peace. Hadn't owed him a damn thing, after what he did to her: the betrayal that still burned her afresh when she thought of it, and how close he'd come to ending her life. You don't forget those things. Why had she bothered to promise him anything? She supposed, with twenty years of hindsight, that she'd felt guilty. As if she were responsible for the deeds that had resulted in his banishment from every place, every society in Hisui. He'd made her feel guilty.
No, she was only responsible for telling people what he'd done. And what frightened, injured, sixteen-year-old wouldn't have told the adults around her? Akari's own daughter was that age now, and the thought of something like that -
Don't even think about it.
Then again, if Akari had known that her account would have mutated, two decades later, into a groteseque warning, a ghost story for children to scare each other with...perhaps she might have thought twice about sharing it. Or she might have decided to sit down and write it out properly, so that time and tongues could not distort it.
But it was too late now. Life had swept her along in its current. Twenty years, in the blink of an eye. And it had been an ordinary life. Just the sort of life that Cogita had recommended to Akari, once it became clear that Arceus was not going to send her back to her own time. Akari could not have built a more ordinary life if she'd tried.
She had a stable marriage that was just fine, built on practicality and respect more than an idealised notion of true love; that was common in Hisui, though she had a vague inkling that she might have felt differently, if she'd been left to grow up in the future. The phrase 'fairytales' kept coming into her mind, but nobody else in Hisui seemed to know that phrase, beyond literal tales about faeries.
She had three children, who were also just fine. Not perfect, not always good, but sensible and hard-working, if a little too prone to adventure-seeking for a parent's liking. But Akari couldn't really be surprised by that. She had never thought about whether she wanted children. Getting chosen by the Creator and thrown back in time to become a world-saviour at fifteen years old had derailed so many things. Akari had missed out on so many thoughts that most young people might have about their futures. But once she'd started considering how she would build a life in Hisui - more specifically, a life that didn't revolve around the "hero" that she had once been - having children had seemed like an obvious way to invest in the future. (Or so Akari liked to tell herself, when it was probably just something biological, like it was for many people.)
She had a part-time job that mostly involved writing and research, in the institute that was the Survey Corps' spiritual successor. In her spare time, she would write down things that she remembered, including some of the old verses and myths that Cogita had told her. It would all end up in the archives, hopefully, alongside the Pokedex and Professor Laventon's journals. Akari's writings were different. Legends and history, rather than science. But, now that the lorekeeper was gone, Akari felt like it was her duty, somehow, to preserve what she could.
She would have preferred for her children to join her in something like this, when they were ready to start working. Not for them to be out there.
Her thoughts began to spiral as she wondered if Volo was as bitter as she'd left him, all those years ago. Whether he'd be so calculating and persistent as to lie in wait for twenty goddamn years, watching her, watching her family, waiting for an opportunity for revenge...
Akari shook her head, rubbed her eyes, and pressed her back firmly against the chair. Her children were capable of looking after themselves. She'd made very sure of that, even if she'd never told them the reasons why. And if they were mining at Oreburrow Tunnel, and it had been going on for years, and there had been no reports of miners getting attacked or scared away, that meant Volo had moved on. In some way or another. Akari didn't care to find out. She didn't need to know. There was a part of her mind in which he would always be terribly alive, whether she wanted him there or not. And now, too, he was alive in stories. He had gone from chasing myths to becoming one himself.
"Please..." She swallowed her words, unsure if she wanted to sound like she was praying to someone who was gone. She thought Cogita might have hated that. She'd hated being exalted in life; she wouldn't want to be some kind of saint after death. So, she rephrased her thought. "I just hope Sam is safe, that's all."
Sam.
It was not a common name around here, but it was easy enough to pronounce. It was from Galar, probably, or thereabouts. Akari had chosen it for her eldest in honour of Professor Laventon, who had cried for an uncomfortably long time when she'd told him the news. Tears of happiness, he'd said, over and over again. Well, who else was she going to name him after? She couldn't remember the names of anyone from her own time, or her own family. And Laventon had been the first person to find her and befriend her in Hisui -
"The kids are saying 'Sinnoh' now. Not Hisui. I can't get used to it." She imagined that, if Cogita was there, she might not have cared much. She might have said something like, 'Well, it could be worse, could it not?'
The garden chair was not as comfortable as Akari had remembered, and she was feeling heart-sore from this one-sided, imaginary conversation. She decided to stand up. On the near side of the house, underneath the bowing roof, the kitchen window caught her eye. Though she felt like she was intruding, she couldn't help but walk towards it. She tried to peer through, into the darkness of Cogita's empty house, but she could only see a shade of her own reflection.
Her face was a little fuller than it had once been, with faint lines connecting her nose and the corners of her mouth. Lines spilled from the edges of her eyes, and divided her forehead whenever she frowned or raised her brows. Her dark hair was streaked with grey. Her reflection in the dusty window was not very clear, but she knew from staring into her own mirror that this was how she looked. Right now, she imagined she would probably look worse from crying. Her eyes would be puffy, her skin blotchy and red. She was glad that it would take a while to get back to Jubilife, so that she might look a little better by the time she got home.
There was only one thing left to do.
Akari took a blue and white Poké Ball from her pocket and threw it into the air. Enamorus, the herald of Spring, hovered above her, at around the level of the house's collapsing roof. This was the Pokémon that had once been Cogita's friend, before Cogita had invited Akari to capture her for herself.
"I brought you in case you wanted to pay respects," she said, swallowing a fresh and painful lump in her throat. "I'm sorry that it took so long. I've been busy."
Enamorus stared down at her for a moment, and then at the partly crumbling house. A breeze stirred as she moved here and there, as if she were surveying the state of the Ancient Retreat, or looking for her former friend's headstone amongst the weeds. Then, without warning, Enamorus zoomed off into the distance, until Akari couldn't make her out amongst the clouds in the distance. The ball remained in her hand, empty and cold. She didn't know whether Enamorus was gone for good, or whether she might return. She'd never felt like she owned her. How could anyone own a force of nature?
But still, Akari hoped Enamorus might come back. Perhaps in the Spring, though that seemed so far away. A turn of a year. A whole new century away.
Nodding in sad acceptance, Akari turned to leave. She thought about how she had come from the future, from a time that she'd hoped to return to, once it was all done. She'd long since accepted that it wasn't going to happen; she had already encountered Arceus and had been bitterly disappointed. She recalled crying on that very doorstep, Cogita's doorstep, in the middle of the night, lamenting her fate. Mourning the fact that she was stuck here, now, in a time that was not her own.
Akari knew that all she could do now was look towards whatever future she had. The future of Hisui, or Sinnoh, or whatever it would become. She liked to think that was what Arceus had intended for her: that she would continue to shape this place, even after her grand heroics were done. She promised that she would do it with a loving hand extended towards the past. She promised that, if this humble place ever came to the authorities' attention during her lifetime, and if they decided to take the land as their own, she'd do her best to make sure they treated it with respect. They would name it in a way that honoured Cogita and the Celestica people, if Akari - or her children - had anything to do with it.
As to what lay in store for her once this life was done, Akari did not know, and tried not to think about it. But thanks to...to everything, she knew she'd been touched by eternity. By things beyond this world. Whether it would be through her children, her writings, her impact on history...or perhaps even Giratina, retaining some memory of her long after she was gone...she was sure that she would reach the future, in some manner.
She would get to go home. Someday. Just not yet.
She hoped Cogita was home, too.